Dame Edith Sitwell was certainly a colorful figure, in a way that almost certainly kept and keeps some people from taking her seriously as a poet. Ah well. You can take her or leave her. I choose to keep her. Her verse just clicks, even as gaudy as it may seem.
Clever interviewer in this excerpt. It's obvious in retrospect that the "some people say" setup to his question is something she would take as a compliment.
3 comments:
Among the last of the great eccentrics Dame Edith surely made a wonderful interview subject at any time but we're lucky there are a few, like this one, that were recorded. Hers is a most elegant and dominant presence on the screen. That she had a very difficult upbringing is no surprise considering what we already know about her early life.
I'm pretty sure I sent you a link to a BBC story about her father, the eccentric baronet Sir George. Even though it has disappeared into goodness knows what library of irrelevance the beeb employs I'm glad to have found another (well worth another look)..
Yes, her poetry is definitely unique. The ones I most enjoy are those she kept simple and straightforward, Still Falls the Rain, for example. Many are a little too wordy for my taste but, like her reference about telling the plumber how to plumb, she had been writing her own kind of poetry for a long time so it would be of me rude to criticize. I'm sure she was fascinating to know.
'Who knows, an artificially intelligent salesman might be just around the corner. It might develop artificial self-loathing, though.'
This remark of yours made me smile.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7mOX7NE8ZI&t=2s
She had a very commanding and unusual presence. There was something beautifully human about it. She and her two brothers grew up to be intelligent and eccentric. They were also very close to each other because of the experiences they'd shared.
A difficult father, I'm sure. As for the BBC, it's part of the--sigh--infosphere, which has pretty uniformly been projecting its own warped priorities for a while, with consequences for what gets preserved and what doesn't.
"Still Falls the Rain" is a classic. Bryan Ferry also wrote a cool song with the same title, which can't be a coincidence. Some of her poetry hits more directly than other bits of it, but it's all her voice, literally and figuratively.
"Get your ding back", huh? Watch out, I guess. I never sealed myself inside, so my reactions might be a little more muted. :)
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